Corporate Management Trainee Program Week 7 2017

Phase 1 of the CMT program is complete! On Friday, we wrapped up finance week by completing our “White Belt” training, which is essentially a framework for solving business problems. We used this training for our last-ever case study, and then we were done! 6 weeks of training has flown by, and we celebrated by going out for some deep-dish pizza at Lou Malnati’s, a Chicago classic. We continued the celebration on Sunday with a trainee potluck—everyone had to bring a dish using at least one Kraft Heinz product! It was a delicious way to wrap up our time together—see picture for our spread.

Although I’m sad that I won’t be seeing my fellow trainees every day, I’m really excited to start my first project! I’m working in sales on the refrigerated team, which encompasses cheese, meats, and meal combos like Lunchables. Right now, I’ve been meeting with team members and sitting in on weekly sales meetings, but my main project will be an analysis of the performance of in-store coolers and racks. I’ll be looking at how we can improve the performance of coolers to increase sales of our refrigerated products.

In other exciting news, this week we also had our monthly meeting with Bernardo! He officially sponsors the trainee program, so every month he wants to check in to see how we’re doing and how our projects/training is going. We sat down with him for an hour and got to ask him questions; it’s really cool to have the CEO of such a large company know your name and be invested in your work!